BIGProblems

We can best work toward addressing and solving the Big Problems related to food, population, water, energy, the environment, economics, education, and war by discussing them in the context of Big History.

Easter, you may have noticed, is not a fixed day in the calendar. The reason has to do with the mismatch between the periodicity of the sun and the moon and the long history of human efforts to create a reliable and consistent calendar.

What knowledge of science, culture and civilization would you most want to pass on to the surviving humans as they faced the prospect of adapting to a new environment and rebuilding their lives over many generations?

Hans Rosling had a question: Do some religions have a higher birth rate than others -- and how does this affect global population growth? Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Qatar, he graphs data over time and across religions, and with his trademark humor and sharp insight, reaches a surprising conclusion on world fertility rates.

Is it possible that there are many other humanlike or “humanoid” species? If so, is it possible that they, too, have histories—histories that might be similar in some ways to our own, histories from which we might even have something useful to learn?

Neil deGrasse Tyson's extemporaneous "testimonial" delivered at the 2006 Beyond Belief conference is an extraordinary example of how a worldview grounded in mainstream science can be exhilarating and evoke "religious" feelings of belongingness to the cosmos.